Computer networks in a data center rely increasingly on sophisticated services to enable scalability, virtualization, and security. These services range from load balancing to firewalls to fine grain network metrics. As cloud computing and other large scale virtual server deployments grow, providing these network services in a scalable and manageable fashion is increasingly difficult.
Ideally, each individual network flow in a large scale server deployment is tracked in order to provide appropriate services, e.g., quality of service, policies, etc. to an identified connection or flow. In some cases, data center switches may provide some of these services, but the number of individual flows passing through a single switch requires excessive switch resources to track and manage each flow.